by John Boyne
‘Don’t matter what you think, Albert,’ continued Yountam, unwilling to allow his friend’s cynicism to alter his plans and ignoring the digs that were coming his way. ‘I don’t hear them generals coming over here to ask your advice on who we should and shouldn’t be fighting. That’s what they say is going to happen and that’s what we ought to be a part of. You don’t want to stay in this tent rotting away for the rest of the year, do you?’
‘No!’ cried Bill loudly, wrapped up in his friend’s enthusiasm, his exclamation coming out so loud and suddenly and with an unexpected falsetto crack in his voice that the other two could not help but laugh.
‘There you are then,’ said Rogers, lying back again, his hand reaching down with neither self-consciousness nor embarrassment to stroke himself beneath the ragged sheet which lay above him, unwashed for three years now. ‘You’ve got a convert there, Davy. Another one on the trail against those diabolical Mormons, may they burn in hell. What a friend he has in Jesus. So when do you start off on the crusades?’ he added sarcastically.
‘We have to get permission to be part of it,’ said Yountam. ‘It’s not going to be easy to get in. One of us is going to have to petition Lew Simpson. He’s got to approve it.’ Simpson had been appointed the commander of the trail and was one of the oldest hands at cross-country bullwhacking, not to mention a fearless, celebrated character in his own right. We have to make our case to him and make it convincing too. They’re not looking for many boys of our age and there’s a fair number wanting to be a part of it.’ He looked across at Bill, who stared back at him blankly. ‘What do you say, Billy Boy?’ he asked. ‘Are you up for it?’
‘Me?’ cried Bill in alarm. ‘Why do I have to ask him? Why can’t you? It’s your idea.’ Secretly, he was afraid of Simpson, a figure of true authority in the fort who inspired fear in all those boys who had yet to encounter real adventure. His legend made him the stuff of both envy and nightmares, while his enormous girth intimidated all.
‘Take a look at me,’ said Yountam quietly. ‘A one-armed boy isn’t going to be the best advertisement for our cause, now is he? And if he takes against me, then he’s likely to take against both of you as well.’
What makes you think I want to go anyway?’ asked Albert Rogers, pausing in his activities for a moment to look across the tent.
‘Well you do, don’t you?’ replied Yountam. ‘You don’t want to be left behind here on your own, am I right?’ Rogers snorted and said nothing. Of course he wanted to go; it was simply his sense of calculated deliberation which refused to allow him to show any enthusiasm.
‘You can do whatever the hell you like,’ was all he said in a casual voice; neither Bill nor Yountam took his derision seriously. They knew he would never agree to being left behind.
‘Here’s the thing, Bill,’ continued Yountam, looking again at the youngest member of their trio. ‘You’ve got that Indian story to tell, right?’
‘I suppose,’ said Bill nervously. ‘Ain’t that good a story though,’ he added, playing it down in order to get out of this task, something he had never done before.
‘You just go to Simpson, tell him about it, make it sound real good, convince him that you’re about the most fearless fellow at Fort Leavenworth and that the trail would be crazy to leave without you and when he agrees you tell him that you’ve got two friends who are every bit as brave and strong as you are and we come as a team and before you know it we’ll all be on our way to the general’s camp. What do you say, Bill? Will you do it?’
My great-grandfather closed his eyes for a moment and thought about it. It was true that he was beginning to grow restless at Leavenworth. He looked at the cramped tent in which they sat, could feel the grumblings in his stomach from the lack of rations they were given, and knew that the time had come to move on. He didn’t really have any choice in the matter.
‘All right then,’ he said, resisting a sigh and forcing himself to sound decisive. ‘I’ll do it.’
Yountam sat back and smiled, satisfied with his persuasive abilities. In the corner, Rogers merely snorted and – spent from his activities – turned over and drifted off to sleep.
Isaac wanted to know whether I told people about my great-grandfather and the life that he had led. I wasn’t sure what to say; after all, I didn’t particularly want to hurt his feelings but the time never seemed right for me to tell my friends the stories that he told me.
‘Well no,’ I admitted. ‘Not often anyway. It doesn’t really come up.’
‘It doesn’t?’ he asked in amazement, looking at me as if it was vaguely crossing his mind to question whether I was actually his son or not. ‘Well why ever not, William? When I was your age I told all my friends. They thought it was the greatest thing ever. A man like that in the family? Doesn’t seem right just to—’
I shook my head, interrupting him. I’m sorry,’ I said quickly. ‘I just … I can never seem to find the right way to tell people about it. About him, I mean.’ This was a lie. I’d been hearing stories about my namesake and supposed ancestor Buffalo Bill Cody for as long as I could remember and as a very young child I felt exactly like Isaac’s friends had felt half a century earlier. I thought it was exciting and unusual and I felt proud that I knew tales of my heritage that other boys of my age could never equal. The adventures which my great-grandfather had undertaken, and at an age not so much older than I was then, fascinated me and made me wish that I could travel the world too, making a name for myself to rival his. And so I had in fact told several people about Bill, but these stories, this revelation, had not received the kind of impressed reaction which Isaac would have expected. Which he would have demanded.
I was seven years old when a group of friends began to form around me, the ones who would stay with me throughout my youth and early adulthood. We became close soon after we met, and before long we were inseparable, our friendship stemming from the simple fact that we sat together in the back row of our classroom. Of the three of us – Adam, Justin and I – Adam, the oldest, was the closest thing we had to a leader, someone we all looked up to and who determined one way or another how we spent our days. Justin was quieter and often seemed happy simply to have us as his friends; he was very open hearted and we knew we could rely on him for anything, while I was perhaps more lively and troublesome than either. We all, however, managed to find ourselves in the requisite number of scrapes and mischief that young boys should.
Their family lives were very different to mine. They each had a mother and father and between them a fair number of siblings, while my house consisted solely of Isaac and me. Also, the fact that Isaac was a good deal older than any of their parents made my domestic arrangements curious to them and as children they were, I think, slightly afraid to come to my house. With good reason, as things turned out.
Isaac was never the easiest man to cultivate as a friend. He rarely showed affection and his abrupt manner could be downright terrifying to strangers. Ever since my mother had left, he had grown to live his life increasingly and vicariously through me. He knew my homework and my schooldays better than I knew them myself. He made me account for every moment of my day and grew offended if he felt that I was keeping secrets from him. And, like any child who for the first time manages to cultivate a group of friends his own age, there were many secrets to keep, many small confidences which I had no desire to share with him. There were things that we did together – childish things, mischievous things – which Isaac had no place in, where he could have held no interest, but which nonetheless he felt excluded from and blamed me for.
He manifested the pain of such exclusion through long silences with me and general rudeness to my friends. When they came to our house, which was not often, he would stare at them suspiciously and hover outside whatever room we were in, always finding some excuse eventually to enter it, driving us to another place, a different part of the house, or one of theirs. He would lean over them and they would flinch if it was evening time as the rush of whi
sky breath could be quite overpowering.
The only thing which my friends liked about my house was the Smith & Wesson gun on the living-room wall. They stared at it with rapt attention whenever they were visiting, but Isaac saw to it that they were almost never left alone in the room with the gun, for as little as he trusted me with his prized possession, he trusted them less. Unlike his attitude to me, however, Isaac refused to tell them his stories, feeling that they were his to hand down to me and mine to deliver to the world, and yet he grew angry at my refusal to do so. He saw it as my betrayal of my heritage and of him.
It was in school that I finally decided to risk telling my classmates what Isaac had been telling me for years, I was about eight at the time and our teacher was asking each student in turn to tell a story about their grandparents. Most of the stories were normal enough, each depicting some pleasant, uncontroversial old person whose life seemed dominated by rocking chairs and allotments, rather than bullwhacking and settling huge areas of North America. When it came to my turn to speak, I decided to take a chance.
‘William,’ said my teacher, Miss Grace. ‘Your turn. Would you like to tell us about your grandparents?’
‘They’re dead, miss,’ I said with a shrug.
‘What, all of them?’ she asked irritably, as if they had died simply to provoke her.
‘All of them,’ I agreed. A few of my classmates turned to stare at me, squinting their eyes in despair. It was as if they thought I was just being deliberately awkward.
‘Well are there any stories you know about them anyway?’ continued Miss Grace. ‘Anything at all you’d like to tell us?’
I thought about it. ‘I know some stories about my great-grandfather,’ I said. ‘I could tell you one of those if you like.’
‘Wonderful,’ said Miss Grace, clapping her hands together in delight. No one had gone back an extra generation yet and she seemed to feel that this was an unexpected treat. She explained to the class just what a ‘great-grandfather’ was, pointing out that it was not just an extra special one, and the room stayed relatively quiet as they waited to hear what I had to say about him.
‘Well,’ I began nervously, licking my lips as I wondered about the reception this would get. ‘It goes back quite a bit because my father’s pretty old anyway. My great-grandfather was born in 1846,’ I said, unsure whether I should go for the potted biography or move straight into some tale of daring that Isaac had ingrained on me.
‘1846!’ exclaimed Miss Grace in excitement. ‘Imagine that!’
‘And he wasn’t born in England either. He was an American.’
‘Oh,’ she exclaimed in disappointment, as if a particularly bad taste had just come into her mouth. She stared at me as if I had just uttered a profanity and was encouraging others to do likewise. ‘An American,’ she repeated. ‘Are you sure of that, William?’
‘Very sure,’ I said. ‘Isaac told me.’
‘Your father told you,’ she corrected me, for she disliked the fact that unlike the other children in the class I almost always referred to my father by his given name. Indeed, I was also under the impression that she disapproved of the fact that ours was a one-parent family and, given the slightest provocation, would have reported Isaac to social services for no other reason than the fact that his wife had run off with another man.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘My father and his father were born in England, but my great-grandfather was an American.’
‘All right then,’ she conceded with a sigh, agreeing to allow him to be of foreign birth if I insisted it was so. ‘An American. Do you know where in America he was from?’ Her question struck me as one which was determined to expose my lie so I took some pleasure in taking it in my stride.
‘Iowa,’ I said and her smile froze. The fact that I, an eight-year-old, knew of a place called Iowa suggested that I might in fact be telling the truth. She just nodded and, opening the palms of her hands towards me, urged me to continue, suggesting that now there would be no more interruptions on her part.
‘He was a cowboy,’ I said after a suitable pause and the entire room exploded in mirth; even my friends, with the exception of Adam, were laughing. A few people made the sounds of guns being shot and lassoes being waved in the air. Others still pushed their hands forward and away from their mouths quickly as they yodelled, giving a fair imitation of a Hollywood-style Indian. Adam merely looked at me and raised an eyebrow, probably assuming that I was setting the teacher up with some elaborate lie.
Miss Grace quietened the room and looked at me with irritation. ‘What do you mean, he was a cowboy, William?’ she asked. ‘What sort of a cowboy?’
‘Well he started out as a bullwhacker, and then he—’
‘A what?’
‘A bullwhacker, miss. He rode in wagon trails across the country, bringing supplies to armies and helping to settle states.’ She looked at me open mouthed, amazed that I was saying this in such a matter-of-fact way, as if people like this existed all over the world and were far from unusual. I continued. ‘Then he spent some time as part of the Gold Rush before joining the Pony Express.’
‘The Pony Express!’ she said incredulously.
‘Yes. After that … I think that was when he joined the railroads, hunting buffalo to feed the crews. That was where he got his nickname.’
‘What nickname?’ asked Miss Grace and I could see her face grow ever more exasperated as the scale of my story grew. I paused before answering but eventually sat up straight, looked her in the eye, and said the two words which Isaac had said to me on countless occasions.
‘Buffalo Bill, miss.’
At that the room collapsed in laughter, children literally banging their tables in mirth, and I looked around in dismay and confusion before – almost as suddenly as they had begun – they stopped and rather than laughing, they were staring at me wide eyed and nervous. I was in a daze and wondered why my ear was ringing and my eyes felt stung. Miss Grace had marched down to my seat and slapped me hard across the face, hard enough that I had almost fallen off my seat, and had it not been directed so that I fell towards the shoulder of Adam, as opposed to the empty space on my left, I would have doubtless landed on the floor. I looked up at Miss Grace in confusion and she was wringing her hands now in anger, her thin, bony fingers growing white as she pressed them tightly against each other, as if she had hurt herself as much as she had hurt me. I felt a slight dampness about my ear and reached to touch it – it was momentarily numb – and when I looked at my hand there was a thin line of blood, for a ring on Miss Grace’s finger had nicked my ear and cut it slightly at the tip.
‘That’s enough, William Cody,’ she said to me, a little taken aback herself by the injury she had inflicted. Her voice was full of fear now at her actions; there was a tremor there we had all heard on too many occasions. ‘I won’t have you making a mockery of me in my own classroom, do you hear me?’
‘But I wasn’t,’ I protested, sufficiently recovered from my shock now to be able to feel the first sting of tears behind my eyes and the words break slightly in my throat. ‘It’s true. My great-grandfather was—’
‘Just because you have the same name as some old mythical cowboy does not mean—’
‘But he wasn’t mythical!’ I pointed out over her shouting. ‘He was a real man.’
‘That’s as may be. But he was not your great-grandfather,’ she insisted. I was confused. In my short life, he had always been my great-grandfather. He had always been the person who connected Isaac and me to our shared past, not to mention the only thing which seemed to connect us to each other. I had never known anyone protest so vehemently against his existence and couldn’t understand why she would do so. Did she know something that I didn’t? ‘He had nothing to do with you,’ she continued. ‘Nothing at all.’
‘But why couldn’t he be?’ I asked her. ‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because it’s ridiculous,’ she said. ‘For one thing, he died hundreds of years ago.’
‘He died in 1917,’ I informed the ill-educated old harpy and for a moment I thought she was going to return to my desk and let rip on the other ear.
‘You’re to stop this, William Cody,’ she said in a firm voice, pointing at me with little stabbing motions. ‘You’re to stop this right now. We’re having a perfectly pleasant discussion here and you must ruin it with a bunch of silly lies. I won’t hear another word from you for the rest of the afternoon, do you hear?’
‘But I—’
‘Enough!’ she shouted. I could tell that she was a little shaken by her sudden and inexplicable burst of rage but I had seen her inflict damage on children before in the classroom and it almost always came out of the blue and was immediately followed by nervous dismay on her part. She wanted no more of me now, wanted my ear to stop bleeding and for me to change my name and maybe emigrate and only then could she move on. I sat back in my desk and said no more, unsure why the telling of these stories should cause such anger on her part. I barely listened as another student nervously began a simple story about his jumper-knitting, hospital-visiting, cake-baking old grandmother and lost myself in thought and eventually anger – not against my teacher, but directed towards Isaac, on whose shoulders I firmly laid the blame. It was his fault I was in trouble, I reasoned. Him and his stupid stories.
An hour later, as we poured out of the room to begin our lunch break, I felt a finger pointed into the narrow gap between my shoulder blades and turned my head around slightly to see Justin standing behind me. He leaned forward to my good ear and whispered, with a slight giggle, his hot breath causing me to shiver a little inside: ‘Stick ’em up.’
Lew Simpson was one of the earliest frontiersmen and it was said that he was the first person to coin the phrase ‘bullwhacking’. At the time of the trail towards General Johnston’s camp, he had been at Fort Leavenworth for several months, recovering from an attack which had taken place in the Rockies earlier in the year when a wagon trail he was commanding was set upon by a group of Indians. While unsuccessful in their attempts to destroy their trail, the attackers had caused some serious injuries among some of the forty-niners who were part of it. Simpson had been close to death when he was brought to Leavenworth but, to the surprise of all, he had recovered and had almost returned to his previous fearsome best, although not only had the experience cost him some of his remarkable girth, but his beard had also visibly whitened during his convalescence. He held court in the saloon of the fort most days as he waited for fresh orders – which could often be weeks in arriving – and it was indeed true, as David Yountam had announced, that he had been instructed to lead a trail to General Johnston’s armies in order to bring them fresh supplies. The trail was to consist of ten wagons and the pay was high – $40 per month per man – for it was known that this was not going to be a simple expedition and that there were many dangers which could lie along the way. These could come not only from anticipatory Mormons, but also from the Indians of the plains who had seen enough to know that the appearance of more wagons could mean the arrival of yet more settlers and the inevitable wars which would see them driven off their land.